To Envy The Dying Man
by Savage Midnight
Summary: Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.
1. Part I

**Title: **To Envy The Dying Man  
**Author: **Savage Midnight  
**Rating: **PG  
**Disclaimer: **I don't own 'em. Kring does. Yes, I'm jealous.  
**Summary: **Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.  
**Author's Note: **Huge thanks to my betas, Aly, for picking up on the little things I didn't and giving me the confidence to continue this, and Kitty, for keeping her eyes open to mistakes.

---

**Part I**

She doesn't know when it happens and nobody notices until they dig out the old family albums. Mohinder tries to distinguish the hows, whens and whys of the situation, but the answers he finds are incomprehensible to Claire and she stops trying to understand after a while. She knows all she needs to know -- that somewhere along the line her cells stopped growing and started dying, and from that moment on her body was constantly healing itself, never becoming less than it was, but never becoming more, either -- and that's enough for her.

She doesn't really think about what it means for her, for them all. Claire has always been about the here-and-now and the future is something to worry about later. So even when she knows, nothing really changes. And because nothing changes, it doesn't matter that she isn't changing, either.

--

Nobody notices after a while. She gets used to adapting her wardrobe, her hairstyle, even her make-up, and she smiles at those that comment on her timeless beauty. She has one of those faces, you see, an ageless bone structure and fresh features that will never really change, even without her abilities. And it's never really about how she looks. It's the way she carries herself, the way she talks and what she talks about. It's not that careless confidence of youth, but that refined kind of confidence that you grow into, that you learn.

And that's how she gets by. Even though she isn't changing, everything eventually changes around her. It's subtle. Her dad's hair is getting a little greyer, her mom is starting to look a little tired, and Lyle is growing up faster than she is and showing bizarre signs of maturity.

Things happen the way they're supposed to when you're growing up. She falls in love with West and then she falls out of love with him. She moves on. So does he. She attends college and she graduates and then she gets a job. And then another. She lives with friends and then she lives alone and somewhere along the way she learns how to function in the real world. She figures out how to make ends meet, to pay her rent and her bills, to do her own laundry and cook her own meals, to book her own dentist appointments and make her own bed. Little things she took for granted once.

Most of the time she forgets. Like most people who don't realise they've changed until someone else points it out, she barely notices that her features aren't shifting. It's a familiar face that stares back at her from the mirror every morning and she's never sure what else she's expected to see.

Sometimes, though, when she takes a minute to think about it, she wonders what she will do when she's forty. Because she knows it won't be normal for a forty-year-old to have this face. But those are rare moments that barely come around.

After all -- Claire is all about the here-and-now. The future can wait.

--

It happens around Peter's thirty-fifth birthday. At least, that's when they notice it.

It's been a while since he's seen Claire, a while since he's thought about her past the abstract. He hasn't needed to use her ability in the last few years and so it isn't until he sees her next that they all figure out exactly what her ability means for him.

He's gained a few crows' feet since the last time he saw her, and there are grey strands in his hair. Nothing much, but enough to mark the passing of time. It's not until Claire, still looking barely twenty, turns up at his birthday party with a gift clutched in her hands, that his mind flashes back to memories of his niece as she had been and still was.

And it's right there, in front of his family and friends, that Peter changes from a middle-aged man into the fresh-faced twenty-something Claire once knew.

--

Mohinder tries to find ways of explaining it. After all, Claire argues, if her ability works the same way for them both, then why does she look like a college freshman while he still looks like a grown man, albeit a younger one than he should be?

He tests out a few theories, tries to explain it in such a way that she and Peter are able to understand. Something about the process of development and decay, that Claire already had her ability when the process of development was complete, that her body was constantly resetting itself to that particular stage in her body's structure. Peter, on the other hand, having acquired this ability far beyond the stage of development, would find that it worked differently in his case. His body did not need to return to the stage in which the process of development was complete; it simply needed to reset itself to the stage before the process of decay began.

"This process," Mohinder explains, "usually occurs around the late-twenties, early thirties. So whenever Peter uses your ability, his body immediately reverses any damage made by the decaying process and reverts him back to a twenty-something man."

Peter doesn't take the news well. He disappears for four days.

When he returns, he can barely look her in the eye.

--

After a while they both try to forget and she respects his unspoken wish for her to remain an abstract presence in his life. He moves on in a way she can't; the aging process kick-starts itself again and in a few years the crows' feet and grey hairs are back. But the damage is already done; he reaches forty and still looks barely past his thirties.

He still has a luxury she will never possess; he's able to move with the passing of time, albeit at a delayed pace, while she is forced to watch it go on without her. With it comes the inevitable loss of her innocence, made worse by the fact that the tiredness within her doesn't match her bright exterior. She tries to unite the two but only ever seems to succeed temporarily.

What was once the here-and-now becomes the future at last and Claire finds herself falling further and further behind.

--

By the time Peter turns fifty -- and that's how she marks the passing of time these days, by counting birthdays that aren't her own -- her mom is riddled with cancer. Sandra can barely get out of bed in the morning and sometimes Claire wonders what it would feel like for her body to know that kind of weariness. But even as she's approaching her forties, she still moves with the same grace and energy she did when she was eighteen.

That's when she starts feeling afraid.

Her mom passes away before Claire's fortieth birthday and she's forced to watch her dad collapse in on himself. This is normal, she knows, for children to grow up and grow old and watch their parents die. But she knows now that she will witness more than her fair share of death and that this lifetime will only be one of many. There's something wrong in that, something unbearable about the knowledge, and that's what really makes her break.

--

She keeps pictures of Peter in a shoebox under her bed. She takes them out sometimes, just to trace the way time has changed him. There are a scant few back from when she first knew him, stolen away from the Petrelli home after her temporary induction into the family. Here is the face of a childhood hero staring back at her, a face she misses more and more as the years go by.

There is one -- and only one -- of them both, uncle and niece together, and she remembers pushing for this photo after Peter's miraculous resurrection, desperate for solid proof that what they had shared had existed.

Thereafter, each photo shows a distinct leap in time. She is glaringly absent from each, a testament to Peter's need to forget, to no longer remember, and to grow old naturally along with his family. And in each picture he succeeds. Despite losing eight years on his thirty-fifth birthday, he still manages to push the years forward, and Claire watches him change before her eyes, growing older and older, slowly and gracefully. New faces appear in the photos. A girlfriend, then a wife, a baby girl, then another.

The evidence is right there, when she stares at a picture of her sixty-year-old uncle flanked by two Petrelli girls that look no older than Claire, that Peter has managed, somehow, to forget her face.

This is the day she learns how to hate him.

---

Her dad manages to hold on longer than she thought he would and she realises in those days that she spends by his deathbed that he's been holding on for her. She and Lyle are the only ones left and her brother isn't far off being an old man himself. She has another two decades, maybe three, before she's lost everyone.

And that's why he holds on, struggles to the very end. He doesn't want his baby girl learning how to cope with loss, learning how to adapt in a way her body can't. It isn't a lesson anyone should have to learn.

He forgets that she doesn't have a choice. Losing everyone won't kill her, though she knows one day she will wish it would. And that's what scares her. Not the dying, not the loss, but the knowledge that she will never be able to follow them, that she will always be left behind, again and again and again.

And that's why, when people ask if she's afraid of dying, she shakes her head. She wants to tell them the truth sometimes, that she's more afraid of living than dying, but she doesn't.

Nobody wants to hear that kind of darkness from an eighteen-year-old.

--

After her dad passes away, she disappears. She spends eight years in England, four in Ireland, six in Prague and seventeen in Australia.

She does everything and nothing, and she realises time moves slower when it lasts forever.

--

By the time she returns to the States, everyone she knows is dead and buried. She's forgotten how old she should be or how long ago she should have died. She keeps calendars and diaries stored away, snippets of information scrawled on and within them, just in case she forgets.

That's another thing she's grown afraid of these days. Forgetting. She tries not to let the years blur together, to become insubstantial, but it happens sometimes.

It's happening more and more lately. With her family and friends gone, she's beginning to struggle. Memories are harder to make and quicker to fade. New friends aren't hard to find but hard to keep, and she's never managed to find one able to look past the facade and see beneath, to understand that she possesses an old soul in the literal sense.

She tries, though. She isn't that close to giving up that she's going to succumb to a lifeless existence, floating through the years without ever really feeling their presence. Maybe in another lifetime or two it won't matter if she disappears altogether, but for now she just wants to try, if only for a little while.

So she goes back to college and studies something new, something different. She lives alone this time, off-campus, but she drags herself out to coffee with her classmates occasionally, joins the literary magazine and attends bad poetry readings, goes on dates with boys and sometimes men. And she keeps reminders of all these little memories in the shoebox under her bed.

--

She's curled up against his tombstone the next time she sees him, tall frame and boyish features the same as she remembers from a lifetime ago.

He's been dead a decade but Peter has never been able to stay that way. She thought him gone for good this time, thought her absence was needed so he could grow up, grow old, and die surrounded by his family. But he's here now, no longer the sixty-year-old man he became, but the young hero she met in a hallway in Odessa once upon a time.

She let go of her hatred a long time ago, even before she learnt that Peter was dying, but now it blooms within her at the sight of his face. Anger tightens her muscles until she's no longer curled, but coiled, hands becoming tight, white fists. She can't bear to look at him, to see all that she has sacrificed so he could die a natural death, a death he has once again cheated. She hates him for all that he has been able to be -- a husband, a father, a _man_ -- while she has never been able to be anything more than a woman trapped in a girl's body. She hates him for cutting her out, for leaving her to crawl through the years alone while he made a family for himself.

She hates him for a lot of things, but mostly she hates him for forgetting her so easily.

--

He looks at her like he's not sure whether she's going to fix him or break him. It seems she's capable of both and that's always been the problem.

She understands all too well. She only hates him now because she loved him once. Still does, because he had been the one to save her all those years ago. But he's also the man that damned her just the same and forgiveness has nothing to do with love.

He's caught between taking a step forward and turning around and walking away. He's trying to figure out whether it's worth it, the damage she will cause if she becomes a part of his life again, or the damage she will cause if she doesn't. It hurts, that he has to weigh his options like this, that she's been relegated to a list of pros and cons but she understands. She understands a lot of things these days.

It doesn't make her any less angry. It makes her furious because he gets to choose. She's never been able to do that, will never be able to do that, and that hurts more than his indecision.

It's enough to make her fight for it, her right to choose. And she tears that control from his hands by being the one to walk away.


	2. Part II

**Title:** To Envy The Dying Man  
**Author: **Savage Midnight  
**Rating: **PG  
**Disclaimer: **I don't own 'em. Kring does. Yes, I'm jealous.  
**Summary: **Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.  
**Author's Note: **Huge thanks to my betas, Hannah, for picking up on the little things I didn't and giving me the confidence to continue this, and Annika, for keeping her eyes open to mistakes.

--

****

Part II

She gives him a decade alone before she allows him to find her. He loses his first daughter in that time and she knows now that he's finally beginning to understand how truly unnatural their circumstances are. He's lost his parents already, his brother and his wife, but this is different. This goes against the cycle of life.

Claire doesn't know this kind of pain and she pities him for knowing such an unnatural kind of loss. That's why she waits for him to find her. She knows it has to be his decision, because no matter how many times she walks away, he will always have the choice. He can choose to go on again, to let himself age, to reach that point when death finally defeats him, or he can wait for her, walk with her through the years for a while until he's too weary to go on.

She knows she can't expect that of him, knows that her hatred is unjust. And she knows now that he never really forgot her, not truly, because he's still here.

--

It all boils down to survival instinct. Peter is still alive because his mind chose to live, chose to remember her, and his body followed suit. Claire doesn't have that choice. She doesn't even know if, when the time ever comes -- and it won't, it never will --, she will give in and let go. Sometimes all she wants is that freedom to choose.

She's at his gravestone when he finds her again. He isn't aging anymore. There are no crows feet or grey strands but there is a tiredness in his face that she recognises. It won't be there for long. Weariness is fleeting for them, if only on the surface. But sometimes that renewal creeps into her and she finds herself fighting to make the years a little lighter, a little sweeter.

It happens again when she sees him. Some people would call it hope, maybe even faith, but Claire calls it relief. The days will shape themselves into something else with him by her side. Maybe they won't be perfect, maybe they won't even be good, but they will be different, fresh, bearable.

Peter collapses into her when he sees her there. Exhaustion makes him boneless, heavy, and there is death in his eyes when he looks at her. He buries his face in her neck and cries hot tears that aren't for her but for a life she wasn't a part of, and she lets him. Because she knows one day there will be a shoebox under his bed, too.

--

They live in the South of France for a while, in a tiny cottage hidden away in the woods. Claire has been a city girl for too long and finds the seclusion tiring, but Peter seems to thrive in it. He spends his days painting, portraits and landscapes and abstracts that he sells for a pittance in the local village. He calls it therapeutic. She calls it active wallowing.

She learns to play string instruments. Acoustic guitar and violin and cello. Sometimes she thrums out tragic melodies or broken rhapsodies just to watch him collapse in on himself. He calls her cruel for doing it, but she doesn't want him growing numb. She knows that wounds have to be prodded, maybe reopened, to be remembered, for people to figure out when things are better or worse. The ability to cry is as necessary as the ability to laugh and if Peter is capable of one he's capable of the other.

Their present is defined by their past and shaped by their future. And in that they are no different from everyone else.

--

It's a few more years before she drags Peter out of his isolation and thrusts him into a constantly-changing world. She forces him back into nursing, never really sure if it will be good or bad for him. Working side-by-side with death will either make him want to avoid it or make him long for it. But she wants him to understand why he chose to survive, needs him to find some kind of purpose to pull him through the years.

Claire's purpose is purely to have a purpose. Because that's something she can choose for herself. The choice is right there, limited or not -- live or exist. Death doesn't come into it. For her there is no final decision. There is time for some mistakes to be undone, for some choices to be unmade, and sometimes it's the lack of closure that makes the years feel heavier.

Peter can choose finality, and she's waiting for that inevitable day when he does.

--

People say to be limitless is to be free. What they forget to say is that the dying man will live like he's never lived before, if only because he knows his time is limited.

Tell a man he will live forever and he will live just as the dying man will. But give it decades, centuries, and that man will be trapped by his own limitlessness. He will envy the dying man and beg for the limitations of a mortal life.

Claire tries not to envy the dying man. And that's how she thinks of Peter. A dying man, slipping away from her day after day, creeping towards mortality. Knowing it will end makes it easier to carry on and she can't hate him for having one foot on the green mile. She thinks she'll be the first to take it at a run.

--

There's four months that stand out, trapped between the monotony of the years, that Peter will always remember. Claire remembers simply because he can't forget.

This is how she defines her life now. Not through birthdays, because there aren't any left to remember, but through the moments that shape them. These moments are few and far between but they take them where they can get them and use them to craft out a life, an identity.

She calls these months the Lilly months. Lilly, with her beautiful blue eyes and tiny hands. Lilly, with her child's face and her body aging too fast, decaying, dying.

Peter's life is living but his job is death. Claire knows he sticks it out because he covets death, is reassured by its constant presence in his life, even if it isn't his. She knows he isn't ready for it, not yet, but to know it's there, waiting for him, makes living a little easier.

Lilly changes everything. Peter, who doesn't wish immortality on anyone, returns home every night cursing mortality and his inability to save his patient. He stares at his hands, hands that nurse death everyday, and wishes he could give his life, his years, to the tiny girl dying in her bed.

Peter believes in balance, that nature gives and takes, and he tallies up the years that nature has given them and wonders who they were taken from. Lilly is only one little girl, but she becomes for Peter the embodiment of everything unnatural in his life. It hits him worse than the deaths of his children. They, at least, knew what it was to grow from children to adults, to build their own families, to die old women in their beds. But Lilly, with her careless grin and unshakable trust, would never know of these things.

Peter should have been long buried when Lilly was born, and once, only once, he asks Claire if the price of knowing Lilly, of Lilly knowing him, are the years that he has taken from her and that he can't give back.

She doesn't answer -- can't answer -- and he never asks again.

The day Lilly dies she finds him holed up in the bathroom with a razor blade, his blood trickling through the cracks of the tiles. He's staring at his wrists in morbid fascination, concentration creasing his brow, and she knows he's trying to focus, trying not to think of her, trying not to heal.

She makes a purely selfish decision when she falls to her knees in front of him, when she drags his head up and makes him look at her. He clenches his eyes shut, refuses to let her in, and he begs her, _please, please, _but it's too late. He's already healing, the wounds closing, the colour creeping back into his face.

__

Not yet

, she says.

_Not yet. Just a little bit longer. Please._

Afterwards he disappears for a month. When he returns there's a picture of Lilly in his shoebox.

-

It's another decade before Claire grows tired of Peter's resentment. Sometimes when he looks at her there's hate in his eyes and it's the only thing capable of destroying her these days. She spends her nights throwing herself off of skyscrapers, dancing on bonfires and burying herself under the ocean. Every time her body renews itself, but her insides grow heavier until she begins to believe that she will die from heartbreak alone.

It's another handful of years before she uses her traitorous body as a bargaining chip. In their world words like _wrong_ and _incest_ mean nothing, and she coaxes him into her bed, wrapping herself around him, anchoring herself to him in the only way she knows how.

It's dark and it's twisted and it has nothing to do with familial bonds. It's blackmail and she knows it. They both do. But Claire is tired of waiting for the day he gives up, gives in, and leaves her alone. If it buys her another lifetime or two, then it's a price she's willing to pay.

When he kisses her it's a punishment. She carves patterns into his skin with her nails in retaliation for the weakness he will one day show, and he lets her. They paint each other in bruises and watch them heal, but the real damage remains invisible, irrevocable, irreparable.

Together they splinter, break, shatter, snap, and somewhere along the way the hate fades from his eyes.

--

What they have goes beyond uncle and niece. That much is obvious. And it's not at all poetic, just a simple fact. The circumstances in which they find themselves bring around a forced intimacy that gradually grows into easy comfort, and familial love becomes just another dimension of their existence. They are a family rooted not just in tradition, blood, biology, but in necessity, history, understanding. Through the years their relationship shifts, twists, breaks and mends. It loses something, gains something else, and it's a balance that is constantly changing to suit their wants and needs.

They never play the roles that others expect of them, only the ones they expect of themselves. They're often mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, but Claire always corrects them, doesn't want to the hassle of feigning public affection and public love. Yes, there is love, but not the kind people will understand or accept or believe. It's ugly and beautiful, treasured and abused, but it's theirs, made by their owns hands, and Claire doesn't want it tarnished by false romanticism.

She never tells those on the outside who they are, who they were or who they'll be. She tells them who they're not, who they weren't and who they'll never be, but only when they ask.

A part of her finds it funny that no one mistakes them for family. They hold Claire's light to Peter's darkness and pass judgement accordingly.

--

For almost a century they are two people pushing and pulling each other through the years. They watch the world shift, watch landscapes change until there is nothing left but memories of what used to be.

It's not the desolate picture Claire expected it to be when she was younger. The world isn't broken and barren and man has yet to succeed in destroying the earth beneath his feet. But there have been changes, drastic and subtle both, and the people have been punished for some and rewarded for others.

The world is thriving and dying depending on where you look, and Claire realises that nothing has changed at all.

-

Her name is Sophie and she is the darkness in which Peter seeks his solitude. He meets her at the hospital, returns home that day with a crooked smile on his face that lingers for months. She catches it, asks to meet the woman that has sparked something inside of him, touched something she'll never be able to reach, and he hesitantly obliges.

Sophie appears on their doorstep one Friday night, a bottle of wine in her hand, and for the first time in a long time Peter introduces Claire as his niece.

This is the moment she realises she's losing him.

-

He asks her for a lifetime. Claire remembers wishing for that once, for a man to ask that of her, and she thought then that it was a price worth paying.

But this is something different. He's not asking for a lifetime with her -- they've had that already -- but a lifetime without her.

He makes promises. Promises that he won't leave her, not forever, just for a little while. Sophie wants a family and Peter isn't jaded enough to give up on the idea yet. But he needs to forget her first, needs the illusion of mortality to keep living, and he begs her to give it to him.

One lifetime. It's nothing and it's everything, and she has no choice but to give it to him. He'll only hate her if she doesn't, will leave her alone for good this time, and forever without him is a future she can't bear thinking about.

He kisses her with something akin to gratitude when he leaves, and begins a life without her.


	3. Part III

**Title:** To Envy the Dying Man  
**Author:** Savage Midnight  
**Rating: **PG  
**Disclaimer: **I don't own 'em. Kring does. Yes, I'm jealous.  
**Summary: **Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.  
**Author's Note: **Here it is. The last part. Thanks to everyone that's read and reviewed this. Huge thanks to my betas, Hannah, for picking up on the little things I didn't and giving me the confidence to continue this, and Annika, for keeping her eyes open to mistakes.

--

****

Part III

There are new pictures in her shoebox. Peter's wedding. The christening of his son. His ten-year anniversary. All of which she isn't invited to. She watches his life progress like a flip-book, years seeming to flicker by faster than they really are. She recognises familiar crows feet and grey hairs, recognises that crooked smile from years ago, and she tries hard to hate him.

Instead she takes up rock climbing and ascends mountainsides without a harness. She finds it exhilarating, like when West used to take her flying, and her life becomes less about finding ways to die and more about finding ways to feel alive.

She meets Christopher when she loses her grip and falls, breaking a good number of bones, including her skull and her spine. He's hovering behind her when she straightens herself out, stands, and turns her head. He stares at her for a second, pale and shaking, and then spins to empty his stomach in a nearby bush.

After reassuring him that he's not crazy, she invites him for coffee and explains everything.

Everything is an overstatement. She explains what she needs to and she misses out what she doesn't. Peter's name never crosses her lips. Immortality becomes a taboo subject, because she's found that most people don't have the capacity to comprehend her situation. There's a certain romanticism in the idea of living forever and it blinds them to the truth of it.

Forever is memories, broken pieces of life that she treads across. Life is seizing the present only to have it slip into the past, but eternity is crafting the past, clinging to it, because the future is too unbearable.

Christopher doesn't know this and he never will. She's good at what she does and these days she can just about make her smile reach her eyes.

Christopher is twenty-nine and Claire has the wardrobe, the make-up and the hairstyle of a woman in her early twenties. It's enough for a while, a few years at least, and she lives the illusion of domestic bliss, loves him in that light, uncomplicated way that reminds her of West.

She buys scrapbooks and slots them in beside her shoeboxes. She saves everything, snaps photos at every opportunity and starts a home-video collection. Somewhere beneath the temporary glee she knows that she's trying too hard, holding on too tight, spending too much time stashing memories away like a junkie instead of living them. But the past is her only present and in some strange way that she doesn't understand, it makes her feel lighter. She knows now that she'll never forget and that's enough for her.

When Chris asks her to marry him, she says yes, because if God can give her this curse, He can give her this blessing, too.

--

Her marriage lasts six years before it snaps. It breaks cleanly, leaving two wholes instead of two splintered pieces, both of them still too respectful of each other to let their differences boil over into hate.

It was good for a few years, that sweet ache in the pit of her stomach, until Chris began to feel a demanding broodiness for children that Claire had never experienced.

She doesn't know if it's her lack of maternal instinct or her fear of passing on her abilities that stops her having children, stops her wanting them. Maybe it's a little bit of both, but whichever it is, she knows her choice was the death of them.

It was inevitable. She's saddened by it, feels hollow for a little while, but with the memories hidden beneath her bed, she thinks it might just have been worth it.

--

She marries again when Peter's son is in his thirties. Samuel is an archaeologist from London with salt-and pepper hair and a George Clooney smile. He doesn't care that he's married to a woman that appears to be barely out of her teens, and she tells herself that it's because he appreciates her mind and not her youthful appearance. And he does. Claire has long since lost faith in intelligent stimulation, mostly because she's heard it all before, but she finds Sam's curiosity refreshing. It's people's belief that they know all the answers that annoys her. She's lived several lifetimes and she still doesn't know. But Sam doesn't pretend to know and derives a peculiar pleasure in trying to find the answers, even if he never succeeds. She likes taking that journey with him, and she travels that path for eleven years before the clothes and the make-up aren't enough. Sam grows tired of being unable to solve the mystery that is Claire and admits defeat with a heartfelt goodbye and a generous divorce settlement that she doesn't accept.

The photos in her shoebox are not the glorious memories she remembers. There are glamorous snapshots in which she stands beside her husband like a beautiful socialite, the intelligence dead in her eyes and a plastic smile curving her lips. Their faces lie, because this was not who they were. They were equals and Claire doesn't want to forget what that feels like.

She keeps them, anyway, because they are a symbol of her refusal to never give in or fade away. But they hide under the photos of her and Chris, of her and Peter. She places the one of Peter and Sophie on their wedding day on the top, and wonders how long it will be before Peter decides to follow his wife into death.

--

Peter is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in his sixty-fourth year, or what appears to be his sixty-fourth year. She finds out three days before Sophie turns up on her doorstep.

Peter's wife looks old, and Claire knows it has nothing to do with age. She's seen pictures of her, with hair that envious silver instead of brittle grey, wrinkles and creases barely noticeable because of the sheer exuberance and joy shining through. But that's gone now, like a light has been dimmed or switched off behind her features. The only thing shining are the tears in her eyes.

It takes Claire barely a fraction of a second to register her presence and to realise why she's here. She's never disliked Sophie, never hated her, and she's pretty sure that Sophie feels the same. There's a mutual respect there that has never been mentioned, that has grown despite the decades that separate them, and there's a silent understanding that they're both aware of. Claire gave up Peter so Sophie could have him for a lifetime, and a lifetime only.

They share one thing in common and that's Peter. And that's the only thing that's ever drawn them together and thrown them apart. Now things are coming full circle and Claire knows that Sophie is here to give back what can no longer be hers.

_Too soon_, she thinks. _You didn't get your lifetime._

Even though she knows what's coming, Claire isn't prepared. As Sophie sits primly on her couch, staring absently at her coffee table, Claire feels something heavy settle in her stomach. Sophie doesn't even look at her when she speaks, unable to meet her eyes, unwilling to look at the young woman who she thinks will be responsible for rendering forty-odd years of her life insubstantial, infinitesimal. That hurts, and Claire hasn't felt that sharp, agonising stab in a long time.

She listens, though she knows what she's going to hear, and Sophie's voice fluctuates between a desolate whisper and a resolute bark. Claire can't decide if she's ordering her or begging her, but when Sophie looks at her, really looks at her, she sees the desperation there, the heartbreak that's leaching the colour from her face and dulling her gaze. And then she starts pleading, tears falling free to slide down her cheeks and curve beneath her chin. A litany pours from her lips. _Please, please, I'll give him back, I'll give him back!_

Claire tries to soothe her, tries to explain that when the time comes, Peter will think of Claire and it will be enough. But Sophie just stares at her, eyes wide and disbelieving, and she shakes her head, _No, no, no, no_.

And that's when it hits. That's when she realises. And suddenly the world seems to tip over, to shatter and splinter around her. Eternity crashes down on her shoulders, knocking the breath from her lungs, and she feels bile rise in her throat. Because Peter has made his decision finally, and he's chosen to forget her, chosen to leave her alone, chosen to die.

His broken promise tastes bitter on her tongue. She feels the hatred boil inside of her, feels, for the first time, that this hatred will be the death of her. But it never will be. It's useless. A fire that doesn't burn. But she lets it simmer there, anyway, just to feel something, anything.

And then she looks at Sophie, eyes hard and cold and determined.

_I'll come_, Claire tells her. _But not yet. Not while he's still strong enough to fight me. And then we'll disappear. We'll have to, Sophie, you know that. And you can't follow. Do you understand? You're giving him back now. He's not yours anymore. But I'll take care of him, I promise. **I promise**._

Sophie is silent, minutes ticking by as she mourns what she's yet to lose. She has weeks, maybe months left with Peter, and it's not enough. Claire can see it. And she knows that even a lifetime wouldn't be long enough. Not for Sophie. She wants an eternity with Peter, not understanding that eternity is a curse that hollows you out, strips away faith and hope and all those things that really matter, and makes death the only thing worth living for. But Sophie still wants forever and Claire shakes her head sadly.

_Love can't survive that long_, she thinks. _Can it?_

Sophie lifts her head at that moment and gives Claire her answer. _Yes_, she whispers. _Yes_.

--

Claire waits seven weeks. Mid-way through the seventh, Sophie calls to tell her that Peter's lungs are shutting down, that the cancer has spread. And it's only when she's sure that Peter is weak enough that Claire finally pays a visit to the man that betrayed her.

She slinks into his room in the middle of the night, demanding beforehand that Sophie stay away. She has to do this alone.

Peter is sleeping when she approaches his bed, the ventilator breathing loudly beside him, and she settles herself on the edge of the mattress and stares down at him.

It's been a long time since she's seen Peter in the flesh, seen his face other than in pictures, and the sight makes her swallow heavily. She's seen him look older than this, but the disease has turned his pallor grey and made his face too thin. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes sunken and his lips paper white. This is Peter as she never wanted to see him, standing at Death's door, and her chest hitches with barely-contained sobs. Tears well and fall unnoticed as she slips her hand into his, staring at the fine bones that gleam white in the shadows. It's almost enough to make her wake him, to make him look at her, to make him recognise and remember her so she can see the life seep back into him.

Almost, but not quite.

Instead she leans down and presses her lips against his forehead. He doesn't stir, even as her tears carve tracks across his skin, not even when she moves her lips up to his ear and whispers, _Don't forget. Please don't ever forget._

She pulls back and rises, stares at his face even as she leans over and flicks the switch. She listens to the sound of the respirator dying down, and then she slinks back, disappearing into the shadows.

And then she waits.

--

**Epilogue**

She does as she said she would, and her and Peter disappear. She buries him where he should have been buried the first time around. Even now, his gravestone is a familiar sight, though the epitaph is barely recognisable. It doesn't matter. She knows what it says and that's all that counts.

She found his shoeboxes stacked beneath his bed, and she buries them with him. Maybe they were memories he shouldn't have had, memories that he gathered on stolen time, but she knows that Peter would want them, would want to remember, because forgetting would make it all worthless in the end. And she hopes there's something of hers in there somewhere, some small piece that he can take with him. She likes the idea that, even though she can't die, some part of her has followed him into Death. It's a small, cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

Every decade thereafter, she visits his grave. She curls herself around his headstone, just like she did all those years ago when Peter came back to life the first time, came back to her, and she waits, clinging to a hopeless hope that he'll find her there and bring _her_ back to life.

But he never does and he never will. He's gone, really gone, and she knows this because she was the one to let him go this time. It was her punishment, her penance, her redemption, her last chance to undo a mistake that never should have been made.

And now she's alone. There are no new pictures in her shoebox, no new memories, only stale ones that are best left forgotten. But she can't forget, not really, and that's the problem. She remembers what it is to be alone, but more than that, she remembers what it was to walk beside Peter, to share her lifetimes with him. And now all that's left is memories.

At night she lays in bed and she prays. She prays for eternity to end, for her world to shatter, for her body to die. But most of all she prays that wherever Peter is, he is remembering her.

Because she, more than anything, wants to forget.


End file.
